Fortnite

Fortnite – PS4 Pro

While the game renders at a native 1080p, the team have poured the extra power of PS4 Pro into dialling up the bells and whistles for a greatly improved overall visual presentation.

Scene lighting gets a huge boost with the inclusion of light shafts, screen-space subsurface scattering and a four-fold increase in volumetric lighting resolution. All in all, this delivers a far more refined and natural simulation of real-world lighting, backed up by a higher quality ambient occlusion (which creates more realistic shading around objects and characters) and higher quality reflections across the scene thanks to a sampling boost in screen space reflections.

Visual effects also see an improvement, with spawn rate for particles being doubled to create fuller, more impressive ballistic effects that also benefit from interaction with scene lighting, making their appearance more natural within the environment.

Taking into account the fast-paced action of the game, not only is motion blur improved on PS4 Pro hardware, creating a more natural sense of movement, the temporal anti-aliasing (which smooths out jagged edges and improves the clarity of fine detail on objects and textures) has an additional feature called ‘dynamic anti-ghosting’, which cleverly improves image quality around rapidly moving objects.

All of this is important too, as – owing to 25% increase in draw distance – there’ll be more objects visible from greater distances and more detail to take in.

Last, but certainly not least, all of these excellent refinements are bolstered by a performance boost throughout, giving a more consistent overall gameplay experience.

Those using regular HD displays will also benefit from hugely improved image quality thanks to down-sampling. This process allows the console to construct a more finely-detailed 1080p image from the full the 4K render, smoothing jagged edges and refining object and texture detail, particularly at a distance.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

Shadow Tactics – PS4 Pro

While this game doesn’t provide a boost to pixel counts or effects, the addition of an option to lock frame rates at either 30FPS or 60FPS (or completely unlock the framerate altogether) means that Shadow Tactics can take full advantage of the PlayStation 4 Pro’s boosted CPU clock to deliver much improved rates of performance.

In raw numbers, the team have confirmed that while on the base PlayStation 4 framerates typically peak around 30-35FPS (which you can lock to 30, if you prefer), on PS4 Pro, users can expect a reliably smooth 60FPS throughout play.

Another detail we’re very pleased to reveal is that Pyre runs natively in 4K on PS4 Pro, which is a first for us. You’ll experience the game running at an ever-glorious 60 frames per second, in that absurdly high resolution that you have to see running on a 4K display to truly appreciate.

I don’t think Microsoft is all that competitive. Xbox One S is priced the same as the PS4, and I don’t think they are competitive at all with the Xbox One X, currently priced at $100 more than the PS4 Pro, and highly likely to be priced $150 more than the PS4 Pro by Holiday. My guess is, Sony will cut the everyday PS4 price to $249, and the PS4 Pro price to $349 this Holiday, and Microsoft will be too expensive, so Sony will keep its price advantage this Holiday.